Taxanes prodrug-based nanomedicines for cancer therapy

Malignant tumor remains a huge threat to human health and chemotherapy still occupies an important place in clinical tumor treatment. As a kind of potent antimitotic agent, taxanes act as the first-line broad-spectrum cancer drug in clinical use. However, disadvantages such as prominent hydrophobicity, severe off-target toxicity or multidrug resistance lead to unsatisfactory therapeutic effects, which restricts its wider usage. The efficient delivery of taxanes is still quite a challenge despite the rapid developments in biomaterials and nanotechnology. Great progress has been made in prodrug-based nanomedicines (PNS) for cancer therapy due to their outstanding advantages such as high drug loading efficiency, low carrier induced immunogenicity, tumor stimuli-responsive drug release, combinational therapy and so on. Based on the numerous developments in this filed, this review summarized latest updates of taxanes prodrugs-based nanomedicines (TPNS), focusing on polymer-drug conjugate-based nanoformulations, small molecular prodrug-based self-assembled nanoparticles and prodrug-encapsulated nanosystems. In addition, the new trends of tumor stimuli-responsive TPNS were also discussed. Moreover, the future challenges of TPNS for clinical translation were highlighted. We here expect this review will inspire researchers to explore more practical taxanes prodrug-based nano-delivery systems for clinical use.